Winchester UI

Particle Flow system created

UI Descriptions:

Objects

Gun - Click button and then click on gun object.
The gun will "fire" in the direction of it's local Z axis, starting from the pivot point.  You might want to create a special object to use for the Winchester gun, and then position and link it to your real gun.

Targets - Select the target objects from the selection dialog box that pops up after you click the button.
You can select as many as you want, but the creation time goes up with more objects.  You might be better off attaching multiple objects into one mesh and using that as the target.  All target objects will be converted to editable meshes and have their XForms reset.  The script supports animated meshes, but not deforming ones (like skinned characters).

Deflectors - Select any additional meshes you want to use as deflector objects for the particle system(s).
These will not be considered when calculating which target objects get hit.  For example, if you add a wall as a deflector, and that wall is in front of the gun, the wall will be ignored and the gun will shoot through it, but it will still deflect debris hitting it from other targets.  I might change this in a future version.

Ground - Pick the objects you want to act as the ground for particles to come to rest on.
The difference between a Deflector object and a Ground object is that particles bounce off Deflectors, but stop on Ground objects.

Gun Options

Projectile - Choose Bullets or Laser.
Bullets are added in the particle system.  This allows you to control the speed, size, shape, etc., and also let's you do something like add a particle trail to the bullet as it's shot.  The laser is created as an animated cylinder linked to the gun.  The cylinder's height is keyed to match the gun firing.

Recoil - Check this box if you want the gun object to spring backwards when it fires.
Distance defines how far back along the negative Z axis the gun with move, in generic units.  The gun moves back in one frame, and Recover Time defines the number of frames it takes to move back to its original position.

Target Options

Bullet Holes – Choose Boolean, Displace, or None.
Boolean physically removes chunks out of the target mesh use ProBooleans.  The chunks are defined by a Geosphere with a Noise modifier on it to create a rough surface.  The size of the sphere is determined by the Radius amount.  After the script is run, the spheres are still accessible and can be changed within the target objects, which are now ProBoolean objects.  The material applied to the spheres will be placed in the Material Editor where you can change it to be whatever you want.

Displace applies a Displace modifier to each target object at the point it gets hit.  The texture used for the displacement map will be placed in the Material Editor for you to adjust as needed.  The targets are also tessellated in the region of the hit, using a Mesh Select and MeshSmooth modifier.  You can adjust the MeshSmooth iterations to add more detail to the displaced geometry.  Note: Sometimes the faces where the target gets hit aren't selected correctly, but you can manually fix that by selecting the faces in the Mesh Select modifier under the MeshSmooth.

None doesn't modify the target objects at all.  This option is available if you just want to create the particle systems without modifying any geometry.

Fragments – Choose Pyramids or Custom to define what the debris that flies off the targets looks like.
Pyramids adds a standard Shape operator to the particle system.  You can change this to Cubes or Spheres after the script is run.  This is mainly for effects that won't be seen close to the camera.

If you click on Custom , a selection window will pop up where you can choose one or more custom objects to use for the debris.

Use Targets as deflectors – This option adds the target objects to the list of deflectors used in the particle systems.
Turning this off may speed up playback of the particles, but leave it on if you want particles to bounce off the target objects.

Fire Options

Radius –Defines how big the bullet holes are.
It's also used to define many of the other parameters, like the fractal noise size for some of the textures that get made.  The value is shown in generic units.

Random +/- – Randomizes the size of bullet holes within the range specified by plus or minus this value.

Start Firing – The frame number to start shooting.

Stop – The frame number to stop shooting.

Random Shots Every – Defines how fast or slow the gun fires.
The lower the two numbers are, the faster the gun will shoot.  The closer the number are together, the more regularly the shots will be spaced.

Specific Frames – Manually define certain frames for the gun to shoot on.
You can enter single frames separated by commas, or a range of frames separated by a hyphen.  Example: 3,6,8-11

If you only want the gun to shoot on specific frames, and not on any random frames, set the Start Firing and Stop values to zero.

Other

Show Warnings – Turns on or off the display of a warning message after the script is run.
The warning is a reminder to manually unlink and then relink the first wire in one of the newly generated Particle Flow particle systems.

General Tips:

Muzzle Flash: A small box is created at the end of the gun object with the words “muzzleFlash” in the name.  It's not renderable, but has an animated visibility track, so any object linked to it will flash on when the gun fires.

You can run the script on the same scene multiple times.  A window will pop asking if you want to continue with the current setup or create a new.  You'd want to create a new to use a different gun, since the script only supports one gun object at a time right now.  You'd want to continue with the current setup if you want to add more targets or more frames to shoot from.

If you use the Displace option for the bullet holes, make sure your target objects are tessellated enough to support it.  It doesn't have to be super dense, but has to have more faces than your standard box with no segments.